VirgoOS: a Debian 13 image for self-hosting. Boot the USB, pick a disk, ZFS and Docker are already there.

Virgo (as in the constellation)

A friend of mine has been building a Debian box meant to be a home server from the first boot, and the ISO images are public.

It is called virgoOS. Debian 13 (Trixie), amd64, hybrid ISO. You write it to a USB stick, boot the machine, and choose Install. The installer copies a system that was already built: ZFS, Samba, Docker, and the rest are on the image. Apt does not run during the install, so a machine with no route to the internet still comes up as a server.

What is on it:

• ZFS, with the module built at image-build time, plus Sanoid (hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly snapshots on the data datasets)
• Samba
• Docker
• NetworkManager, Avahi/mDNS, and a default-drop firewall with fail2ban
• NUT, so a USB UPS can shut the box down cleanly
• A small web UI (virgo-api / virgo-ui) on port 3000
• A floating virtual IP, for a box with a bonded NIC

BIOS and UEFI both boot. Secure Boot has to be off: the ZFS module is built with DKMS and is not signed by a key the firmware trusts. There is a separate ARM64 branch for Raspberry Pi; the ISO on the org page is the amd64 one (RPi/arm64 is also available)

SSH is enabled and the image ships with a default account. Change that password before the machine is reachable from anywhere you do not control. root is locked.

ISO and the rest of the project: https://github.com/univrs-cloud

The image build repo (live-build stages, if you want to see exactly what gets installed): https://github.com/univrs-cloud/virgo

Try it and tell us what you liked. Thanks SelfHosting!